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Abuse, even a one-time moment of rage that used abuse as punishment or an attempt to control the victim, robs us of our innocence and makes us feel powerless over our own life.

It drives us into a codependent role – attempting to please others to keep them from abusing us. The problem with this faulty thinking is that it often has the opposite effect.

People tend to continue to abuse our good nature, take us for granted and treat us with contempt. A lack of appreciation and more verbal, mental and physical abuse may follow.

We strive throughout our life to lay down our life in hopes that someone will love us; but we actually teach them that it is okay to take advantage of us, because we constantly put our needs last.

Trauma does not always make us stronger. It may also make us a ball of nerves, fear and insecurity. We are actually weaker, because we are always on the defensive.

We may develop PTSD, much like any survivor of a battle zone, and react to life with this fractured thinking and behavior. Medication may be necessary to help us to remain calm and lucid until God heals us.

Journaling helps us to heal by allowing our Inner Parent to understand the deep wounds we experienced and to nurture our Inner Child as we turn our words into a prayer for God’s healing.

Prayer:
Father God, I pray for victims of abuse of every type. Give them the deep comfort that can only come from Your love. Restore to them their joy in life and remove from them the fears and insecurities, which plague their life. Redeem their heart and mind and give them a new outlook on life.

Teach them that although people may not be trustworthy, You are always trustworthy. Help us to remain vulnerable and kind, yet wary and wise (Matthew 10:16). Show us the balance between serving others without teaching them to take us for granted by always putting our needs last.

Thought for the Day:
God’s perfect goodness and love find expression in the midst of wickedness and degradation; because He experiences every slight right along with us and carries our pain and burden for us, if we will relinquish it to Him.

Humans often function on automatic pilot. We repeat tasks hundreds of times and pay no attention to the details along the way. Sometimes, “the devil is in the details”.

We get tied up in the details; and the good things we run around accomplishing rob us of the best things, which God called us to do with our life.

We wear different hats according to the requirement of the moment at work, home, church and play. We segment our soul and personality to meet the expectations of those around us.

Some of us dissociate from parts of our identity and suppress the expression of those personality characteristics. Sometimes, we experience trauma from which we use dissociative amnesia to escape the memory.

We cannot remember parts or all of our past; and, at times, even present events. We function on automatic pilot in multiple personalities in order to fit in or to cope. We lose part of our true self with every trauma we experience in life.

Some of us are schizophrenic, we hear our different ego states conversing with one another and we fear we are going crazy. One part of our self may sabotage or fight against the other.

This dissociative identity disorder attempts to save our life from the extreme pain of our past. Once the Holy Spirit moves into our spirit, He sorts through the various alter egos we create to protect our self.

He heals the pain of our past and allows us to release our grasp on various personalities we used to defend our self. We realize that God is here to protect us now and we have no need to hide behind alter egos.

Prayer:
Father God, the indescribable pain which human beings inflict on one another is caused by rampant sin and suggestions by the god of this world (2 Corinthians 4:4). Regardless of what we experience, however, there is healing in Your wings (Malachi 4:2; Psalm 91:4); and we can hide beneath them until we heal and gain the strength to face this world with Your perspective.

We sing for joy as we snuggle into your feathers and find safety, comfort and security from this world, which often frightens us (Psalm 63:7). Help us to serve as a lifeline to others who also face traumatic events in this life, and give us opportunities to share Your comfort with them in very real and tangible ways.

Thought for the Day:
We can ask God to strengthen the inner being of those we love by His Spirit, so that Christ may dwell in their hearts and they may also find His eternal healing. – Ephesians 3:16

Life in this perverse and dark world is evil at best and cruel and unthinkable at its worse. The atrocities perpetuated on one human being by another without conscience is wounding and debilitating.

From a one-time event to repeated and ritualistic abuse, we tend to bury this pain in our subconscious mind and often refuse to revisit it or we may deny its existence. Yet, it influences every moment of every day of our life.

Traumatized in body, mind and emotions, we separate parts of our self and bury them in the past, moving forward with any self-respect and reality, which we can find.

We survive by erecting walls, hiding behind anger, staying in a protective mode to prevent future real or imagined abuse. We cope through any means available, even addictions and defense mechanisms.

As Christ strengthens us from within and becomes the focus of our life, this pain loses some of its strength. God’s love covers a multitude of sin perpetrated against us and helps us to forgive and move on.

He brings these issues to light along with the lies, which Satan plants in each trauma. He speaks His truth about each memory and situation and completely sets us free from bondage to these memories. ( http://www.theophostic.com )

As God reveals any issue which may keep us in bondage to sin, Satan, the world, the flesh and our past, we recover the bits and pieces of our self, which litter our past and God heals them and molds them back into our life as productive pieces of who we are today.

Prayer:
Father God, You see the secret pain of our past and desire to search us and to heal the pain which causes our current fears, depression and anger. You lead us into complete healing by Your Spirit to live whole and complete lives unhindered by the pain of our past (Psalm 139:23-24). You make us a new creation, created by Christ Jesus for good works to further Your Kingdom on the earth (2 Corinthians 5:17).

You bring an article, a sermon, a Bible verse, a song, a comment by a friend or enemy to open those wounds, remove the splinters and to allow us to heal from the inside out. We bring our troubled thoughts to You and rejoice as You lead us to the freedom only You can provide both now and throughout eternity.

Thought for the Day:
The Holy Spirit is God’s wonderful Counselor who operates on the infected splinters embedded deep within our soul and frees us from the source of the infection, healing the wounds and making us whole.

Satan plants lies in the trauma of our past to keep us in bondage to the negative emotions of that incident. This fear, dread, shame, depression, deprivation, anger, revenge, etc. all influence our life every day.
( http://www.theophostic.com )

These negative feelings filter into our conscious mind from our subconscious mind and intensify our current mood. They program us for failure, addictions, broken relationships and stress. They control our life and we often do not even realize that they are there.

Satan blinds us to their existence and has a field day with our emotions. The solution to this Pandora’s Box is to submit our thoughts to God and to ask Him to show us these lies and His truth about them (Galatians 5:1).

Start with the manifesting negative emotion and consciously concentrate on the words in your mind fueling that emotion. Those are Satan’s lies. Then ask God to show you His truth about these lies.

Sometimes, the negative emotion will lead us to an idol in our life. We relinquish to God our expectations and pet peeves, which fuel our negative emotions and cause us to feel frustrated, irritated and angry.

God frees us from the tyranny of these emotions. This freedom is our inheritance as children of God (John 8:36). There is no reason for us to remain in bondage to these past issues, when we are guaranteed this liberty through Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary’s cross (Galatians 5:1).

It may take a while for us to walk in total freedom from the past, but little by little and day by day, God delivers us from Satan’s lies and bathes us in His peace, joy and love.

Prayer:
Father God, remind us that pride and rebellion restrict our freedom in You. We cannot walk in Your Truth (Psalm 119:160) without walking in Your righteousness as well. You desire our total devotion and worship (Mark 12:30). That is why You created mankind in the first place.

As we completely surrender to Your will for our life and exalt You above all else, we will decrease as You increase in our soul (John 3:30). We will feel fewer negative thoughts and emotions and find Your joy, which is beyond description and full of Your glorious presence (1 Peter 1:7-9).

Thought for the Day:
Unbelief, the flesh and disobedience will keep us in bondage to Satan’s lies.

We search our whole life for a person or accomplishment to complete us, to make us whole. We drive our self to distraction, like slaves who never measure up.

We want so desperately to find love, acceptance and abundant provision. Yet, our soul is fragmented all along the highway of life. Our identity is falsified with Satan’s lies.

Lost loves, rejection, physical abuse, belittling, deprivation, abandonment, high expectations and a myriad of other traumas and negative experiences will chip off pieces of our soul and leave it behind in our past.

The false labels, which we use to identify our self, are destructive and demeaning. They restrict us with feelings of futility and worthlessness. We feel hopeless and helpless.

We cripple our future with the pain of our past. We may do immoral things, but that does not make us a bad person. It only identifies us as a sinner in need of Jesus as our Savior.

Good people do not go to heaven, and bad people do not go to hell. Believers in Christ go to heaven and unbelievers condemn themselves to eternity in hell (John 3:16-18).

As we find our true identity in Christ alone, He takes us back to these losses and recovers our true self from the rubble we left behind. His love completes us and His provision satisfies us.

Prayer:
Father God, thank You for renewing our mind and transforming it into the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16). Jesus freed us from the bondage, which Satan attempts to bind us with, and He gives us the right to become Your children (John 1:12, 8:36).

Help us to forgive our self for the sins of our past, just as You forgive us (Matthew 6:14). Remind us to follow the direction of Your Spirit through each moment of our day and to bring You the glory for our every thought, word and deed (Psalm 143:8).

Thought for the Day:
God is the only one who can restore our soul and make us co-heirs with Christ to His Kingdom. – Psalm 23:3; 1 John 3:2; Romans 8:17

God orchestrates the losses, broken heart, difficult trials, and painful tribulation in our life to bring us to the place of total surrender to His love and our perfect submission to His will.

The quicker we come to the place of complete compliance to His will, the fewer negative aspects enter our life.

The less we trust in and cherish the temporal aspects of this life, the fewer losses we experience.

The more intimate we grow in our union with Christ, the less we experience the negative effects of trauma.

We are not devastated by our losses, because nothing can separate us from God’s love (Romans 8:35-39). We will not lose Christ, and He is all we really need.

We are complete in Him (Colossians 2:10). We have all wisdom, right standing with God, holiness and redemption in Christ (1 Corinthians 1:30).

His grace is sufficient to uphold us in any tragedy or insufficiency, which we face in this world (2 Corinthians 12:9). In Christ, we have every spiritual blessing, which heaven has to offer us (Ephesians 1:3).

God perfects us and sanctifies us in Christ (Hebrews 10:14). Jesus is not an option to add to our life; He is our whole life (Colossians 3:4).

He is our peace, and He breaks down every wall, which stands in our way (Ephesians 2:14). Jesus is our treasure hidden within us; our pearl of great price; our coin, which was lost, but now is found (Matthew 13:45-46; Luke 15:8-10; 2 Corinthians 4:7).

Jesus is our all in all (Ephesians 4:6). He contains all the fullness of the Trinity (Colossians 2:9), and He triumphed over our enemies through His death (Colossians 2:15).

He gives us victory through His resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:55). Jesus is all we need (2 Peter 1:3-4).

Prayer:

Father God, thank You that through Christ we have redemption through His blood and forgiveness for our sins. He is Your actual image and through Him everything was created and is under His authority. He is our all sufficiency (Colossians 1:13-16).

Remind us that the philosophy of man and the cares of this world are nothing when compared to the majesty of Christ on high. We give Him all of our praise and the glory for everything we ever accomplish through Your Spirit.

Thought for the Day:

Through Christ we find our right standing with God and enter a spiritual life, which never ends.

We experience trauma in this world in so many different ways. Even Jesus suffered in every area that we do; yet, without sin (Hebrews 4:15). We too can handle trials through Christ in us (Colossians 1:27).

There are people in this world who willingly, knowingly and purposely inflict anguish upon other people. They feel no remorse for the wounds they perpetrate.

They even take some perverse pleasure from hurting someone else. These people are wounded souls who find solace for their pain in demeaning, degrading and depriving others.

God tells us to be kind to our enemies because this uncharacteristic response to cruelty will prick the conscience of the offender, and may even cause them to turn from their wicked ways (Proverbs 25:22).

When we struggle to forgive someone, because they are being blessed in spite of their behavior; this causes us to feel further abuse. However, God protects His own (Matthew 5:45; Psalm 121:7).

If evil-doers remain bent on their course of destruction, they will reap paybacks for what they sow, either in this life or the next (Galatians 6:7). Eternity is the great equalizer (Psalm 37:7; 73:3).

Everyone is rewarded for their deeds, whether good or bad (2 Corinthians 5:10). God promises to take revenge on those who inflict pain upon His children, and God never breaks a promise (2 Corinthians 5:10; Numbers 23:19).

Prayer:
Father God, when we view trauma from Your perspective, we realize that our current issues are nothing when we compare them to Your glory, which these trials reveal in us (Romans 8:18). This glory is a witness to a lost and dying world around us.

They see that we suffer with grace, dignity, hope and even joy (James 1:2); and it impresses them. Help us to always look for the seed of a miracle within each trial, which You allow to come our way (Romans 8:28).

Thought for the Day:
When we draw our security from the Son, instead of some substitute, our serenity in spirit and soul lasts for eternity.